A blog on technology, run by Kozminski University students and supervised by NeRDS

Tag Archives: 90s

Have you ever heard of Neo-Luddism? Or have you ever heard the term “Technophobia”? There are people in the world who oppose to technology or are afraid of it. Actually, how can you not be afraid of technology after watching Black Mirror? 😉

These two terms mentioned above refer to extreme phenomena. However, there is a trend in technology that aims at traveling back in time. Well, not literally. There are apps that will make people, who were born before widely accessible computers, feel pretty nostalgic. By that I don’t mean 1950s, but let’s bring 90s back!

VHS Camcorder

Do you remember the thing called VHS? Kind of old-school, I know. But don’t you sometimes miss it? Those white number in the bottom-left corner of the video that instantly tell you when it was recorded and that it’s a tape from your 3rd, not 4th birthday? Now you can have these back on the videos recorded with your smartphone. How cool is that! For $3 you can download it here.

Source: itunes.apple.com

Games

There are some classics you’ll never forget. Games of our childhood, which we really spent hours playing. They were not complicated and graphics were… well, were enough back then! Of course, now with the ocean of games and consoles like Xbox or PlayStation, with the growing market of Virtual Reality in the gaming industry it’s easy to find top quality entertainment. But don’t you sometimes miss good old Pac-Man, Snake, or Tamagotchi? I do! If you want to travel back in time when standing in a line or in the bus, just download old-school versions of those games.

Photography

Now let me show you one of my favorites! Meet Yoso, a new Polish product that can change your smartphone into an analog camera. Nowadays we tend to take gigabytes of pictures every day. You’re at a concert? You take 300 pictures. You’re going out? 50 selfies. In a restaurant? #instafood. Vacation? 1000 pictures. Most of them are the same, few of them are good. And most probably you won’t go back to the majority of your pictures because it’s just too much! Yoso will make you actually think before taking a picture, you won’t see it instantly, but then they’ll send you a physical copy. Wouldn’t it be great to have 36 awesome pictures from vacation and simply live the moment for the other 9964?

Conversations?!

It’s not an app, but still an exceptional idea. Last year MasterCard started a campaign in Warsaw restaurants called #PricelessTime. Its goal was to make people put their phones down and start having real conversations. That they did was installing special capsules in the restaurants. Based on the time people’s phones spent in the capsule, customers were given prizes.

The idea is brilliant and sad at the same time. Do we really need a prize to focus on the people we met with? I hope this campaign will inspire you to re-thinking the way you spend time with your friends. How about living real life even without special apps and capsules? 😉